Step Up, Step Up
by LittleGreenBudgie
Summary: Funny thing is, you don't just wake up from a five-year coma and walk back into your old life, Godot learns. Things change. You change.


Your ritual is the same every morning.

Wake up to darkness. Only the faint blur of _something_ indicates that your eyes and heart haven't given out on you. Groan from the pain of your usual morning headache. Feel your way to the bathroom, still slow and tentative even after six months of blindness. Shower with the lights off. Towel off, stagger back to the bedroom. Fumble at the bedside table for your visor, slip the strap over the back of your head, and hit the "on" switch. Wait while the machine comes to life. Everything is cloudy for a moment before the visual processing software kicks in. Your vision is fuzzy at the edges and the colors are bled out even with the visor, but you can see.

Take your medication with your morning pot of coffee. You have enough pills to knock out a horse. It would make you laugh if it weren't so depressing. Read the paper. There is rarely anything worth hearing about, but you have missed too much of life to miss any more. Feel sick by the time you've finished the pot; your pills don't always agree with you. Rush to the bathroom and see if you'll throw up today. You do. Stare at yourself in the mirror while you brush your teeth. You don't like seeing yourself, but neither Diego nor Godot has ever been afraid of anything.

You look weak and wasted. Six months of physical therapy cannot compensate for five years lying motionless. Track marks from countless IVs leave you looking like a junkie. Your hair is white as snowfall on your head, but only in streaks and patches on the rest of you. Scars mark up your torso from a dozen surgeries—after so many grafts and transplants, half your organs aren't yours anymore.

Shake off your introspection. Put up your razor. Get dressed. Mia saved all your stuff in case you ever woke up, bless her, but you're not as broad across the shoulders or chest as you used to be. Layer up under your dress shirt. You are cold all the time now, and it makes your old vest almost fit right.

Check yourself out in the mirror on the way out the door. With your clothes on, you look almost as good as you used to. Flash a roguish grin at your reflection and throw open the door. Catch a bus. You can't legally drive and you're too weak to bike.

Go to work. Sit in your office most days, stand in court the others. Know you're prosecuting the wrong person. You need to see if Trite learned anything at all from Mia, though, so you can't bring yourself to care. Wait for recess. Your feet and legs ache by the time it arrives. Slump on the couch in Lobby #1 for twenty minutes. Crave a smoke, but you kicked the habit back when Mia was alive, and it might kill you now besides. Force yourself back to your feet by the time the trial resumes.

Go home and crash on your bed. You have physical therapy later, but you always nap beforehand. Seventeen cups of coffee are enough to bring you to baseline, but not enough to keep you up. Sleep with your clothes and visor on. It is easier.

Wake up. Wolf down a microwave meal you barely taste. Sight isn't the only sense that has been dulled by Dahlia's poison, just the one that cripples you the most. Drink another pot of bitter coffee. Catch a bus again. Hate your therapist's pitying stare, but you don't care quite enough to find another. Work through exercises that always leave you in pain.

Go home. Review the case again. Check your e-mail to see if there is any update from Misty. Against your better judgment, open the photo album Mia made you. Nothing looks how you remember it, and not just because the colors are wrong. Don't cry. You can't even if you want to; your eyes will burn and your throat will close, but the poison took tears from you, too.

Listen to the radio and finish another pot of coffee. Your doctor hates it, but you don't need to live forever. Just long enough to break Trite and make up for your own failure. Read a little. Catch up on the latest game on the television. You have a duty to fulfill, but you are also only human.

Take off your clothes. Remove your visor. Go to bed early. You are never blind when you dream, nor do you have the washed-out vision of those stupid goggles, but rather the crispness of remembered sight.

Sleep, and wait for tomorrow.


End file.
